A Message from the Community Manager

i started playing during the head-start, and the guild i was an officer in disbanded when pretty much everyone got fed up with ev and i as a tank got tired of the game's tanking mechanics (which you have since adjusted/buffed). I returned to the game about a month ago, and leveled a new character to 50, found a guild, etc.

My experience is damaged by the ratio of good news vs. Complaint posts. In other games, wow, swg, etc, the communication and the "carrot" as it were was strong, and they'd continuously put the carrot out of what was coming next. Getting two of the same pets only with different colors, this seems very rushed and "whatever just give them something." the event was the same way, i completed the scavenger hunt, only to... What? Nothing. No cut scene, no battle, nothing epic. Here have a pet, you're done. Really?

That was what people waited months for?

I have tried to extremely hard to stay positive and become a supporter of your product here, i even invited one of my employees to play the game and bought them a copy. I'm doing my best, as a fan, to be supportive, but the producer of the game needs to stop putting you community managers out front with empty apologies and nothing substantial to offer us. How do you respond to the fact that the community was promised "monthly content updates" and that simply has not happened?

We need more than a canned "we're going to try harder in the future" line. Do or do not, there is no try.

I don't expect the world, but i would like to see this game managed with some class, and some sense of what good pr is and bad pr is and not have the feeling that even the producers have no idea what they're going to be allowed to do. This is every reason why a great company like bioware shouldn't be sold to ea where everything that it stood for as a quality game producer can be ripped out and replaced with classic ea solutions that some exec producer feels are easier to scale.

Please... Get things back on track.

Well it may only be a hot air and fluff post but it shocked me to see something on the devtracker that wasnt just 'we're looking into it'

Hire some people to do nothing but hang out here on the forums and talk to us regularly, as informally as is reasonable and without pretense.

You're terrible at selling yourselves. There is nobody appearing to be 'on our side' ...well, ever. Consequently, there is no one that has much ability to ameliorate and redirect the growing partisanship or its attendant hostility when the 'us versus them' gets deep-set.

I Don't Trust You.

Obligation to do so; needing to do so; does not make me do so. Its a very nice post, OP; really, I admire the effort you're taking and I genuinely hope, for the sake of all of us, that you mean it.

But, I don't believe you. Its not that I'm specifically questioning your veracity so much as that I'm questioning the validity of the premise you're presenting. Another way of saying it; I believe that you believe what you have said, at least to some extent or another.

I do not, however, believe what you are saying. I do not believe that you or any Bioware employee earnestly cares about we, the players. I do not believe that the quality of our experience here on this forum or there in the game itself is anybody's reasonably high priority. Note that I don't say 'top' priority because it is a business, and in trying to be fair, businesses have many priorities and all of them are The Most Important One (conflicted as that seems to say).

Reasonably high, I would be fine with. Consistently middling to high, I would be pretty dandy with too.

I am neither fine nor dandy, however, because I do not believe you. I can't. All I have to go on is my experience and my observations of the experiences of others, and none of it tallies up to very much reason to believe such assertions as you have made, OP.

There are some number of people (at least one, being me) that Do Not Believe You. Our trust, in whatever portion it was had, has been lost. There are no forum agencies representative of Bioware or Bioware's interests that have stood by us, that have taken the time to explain things, that have been human beings alongside us and risen above the most common denomination of behaviours common to mob mentality to assuage us in times of crisis.

We've gotten a lot of sterile marketing rhetoric, though. Empty promises, we've got bucketloads of. Gallons, even.

Here is my opinion of how to correct this problematic issue --

1 - Do Things Visibly. This post is a good start. Don't let it be your last one. Don't run away from the forum because there's built-up anger and its unpleasant and people keep asking the same questions, misinterpreting the answers, sticking words in your mouth and generally being clowns. Post more. Be a presence that people can see being a representative and a leading force of community development.

2 - Show Me You Love Me. By me, I of course mean us collectively. Jump on threads that are purely human interest. Have an opinion. Have a respectable, well thought-out opinion. Laugh at your own typos once in a while. People have this weird tendency to be endeared by that which is familiar and comfortable; become familiar and comfortable. They'll love you for it with the fond resentment that is obligatorily due anybody thats wearing a Boss Of You hat.

3 - Be Excellent To Your Pets. By pets, I of course mean us collectively. We're not real people to you, in great majority. Very probably, we're not even screen names you'll commonly remember unless we're associated with Doing Something Wretched on such a scale as that we become five minutes worth of office gossip, or less frequently, do something of significant and lasting impact in a more positive fashion, such as make a guide that gets and stays quite popular. We can't all do something of significance like that; many of us don't know how, don't have the time or simply don't want to. You surely don't want us doing things worthy of becoming five minutes worth of ugly office gossip. Remember that we're people too though. Pat us on the head from time to time in threads nobody would expect you or your appointed minions to weigh in on, for example.

4 - Monkey See, Monkey Do. Be the change you want to see. Right now, the dack is stacked against you, and it isn't fair. You're gonna have to do a fair bit of social mountaineering to reach sunnier, less treacherous slopes as a Community Anything. If you do it and you stick it out and you Do Things Visibly and you Show Us You Love Us and you're Excellent To Your Pets, however, I think you might go far with this.

And you might find that we're people too, most of us probably just looking to have fun with a game we'd really like to like, and that we really don't (probably, most of us, I'd imagine) want to hurt your feelings or make you dread your job.

Or, for that matter, plaster yet more inches onto the wall of apathy and We're Not On Speaking Terms that seems to exist between everything Bioware and everything Playerbase, unless it came out of a can and was boiled by someone with a highly dubious degree in something that swore up and down it was Marketing.

Help us help you. I, at least, would like to believe you. There's how to get me to do that again.

There is a difference between information and coddling. Many here want that coddling. If I look up a blue post I'm hoping it has something to do with hard issues in game, not reassurance or pandering to the same whiners that complain about everything and desire personal attention.

Just the facts, ma'am. Waste not on placating.